From our winnowing of the chaff of ages have emerged a very few
hard won grains of apparent fact. First and foremost, the bulk, and
presumably all, of these surviving sonnets was written from about 1593 to about 1599. This conclusion rests fundamentally on long
accepted literary relationships, controlled by external facts. The
fundamental principle of these literary relationships has been to
discover the basic source of origin and thence to determine direction
of evolution, just as in manuscript relations. Division into series
has no bearing here, but is an independent and correlative by-product
of our examination. The majority of these fundamental relationships
and all the external facts have long been known and accepted. I
have simply gathered them and put them together to discover what
their genetic pattern would tell us. The facts, both internal and
external, are sufficiently numerous and have stood the acid test of
scholarly examination for a sufficient length of time to neutralize
the combined personal equations of previous scholars and to minimize my own.

Perhaps it should here be emphasized that in our study we have
not used parallels as such; there is always a base from which to
determine direction of development. The base may be found to be
inadequate, the direction of development as indeterminate; that is,
some of our instances may be found to be only parallels and so
useless in this analytical framework. But parallels as such have
not been used.

There have, of course, been efforts in the past to use parallels.
Ordinarily, these would need to be reduced to statistical level in
order to be interpreted. Such a test is that of twice-used words.
It is a simple matter now to test this idea statistically. The letters A
and B in Bartlett's Concordance will be sufficient. So far as I can
see, each of the plays represented is about equally yoked with
every other play by twice-used words. I find no significant statistical
incidence at all to indicate relative chronological position. If twice-
used words yield no statistical significance, neither, it would appear,
could twice-used phrases as such, as advocated by Beckwith. At

Print this page

While we understand printed pages are helpful to our users, this limitation is necessary
to help protect our publishers' copyrighted material and prevent its unlawful distribution.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.